“In one study in Canada, ‘misdiagnosis’”’ of psychiatric labels was found to be 65.9% for major depressive disorder, 92.7% for bipolar disorder, 85.8% for panic disorder, 71.0% for generalized anxiety disorder, and 97.8% for social anxiety disorder.”
This article by Mikaela Marinis and Jhean Paul Varela Carrero has been published by the Essentia Foundation. It begins:
“In the mental health fields, there are two views towards psychiatric diagnostic categories: the realist and constructionist, which correspond somewhat to materialism and idealism. Arguing that the psychiatric diagnoses we create do not literally exist as discernible brain states, but are instead just helpful constructs, is critically aligned with idealism and offers a very different perspective to patients and their self-image.
When you are dealing with mental illness, you might defer to a psychologist or psychiatrist to help you figure out what precise illness you have. You may imagine that the mental illness represents a lack of a certain neurotransmitter, or even that you are about to finish a personality test, and find a new group of people just like you. Maybe you hope you don’t get ‘misdiagnosed’ and the psychologist or psychiatrist gives you the wrong treatment. But what if most of the diagnoses were pretty much, semi-secretly, the same?
Before the Enlightenment in Europe, judges lacked standardized procedures and legislation that would enable them to create uniform sentences. If two people committed the same crime in different geographical areas of the same State, judges would come up with completely different punishments, at a time when monarchies kept unlimited power …”
You can read more from here.
